President Obama has an important decision to make right after his inauguration.

Is he going to continue to make our government bigger and continue to push for socialist changes to our system or support what has made our country the most progressive and influential system in the world for the last two centuries, the free enterprise system?

I can understand his actions during his first term. His experiences as a community organizer probably taught him that some groups in our society were not taken care of. And he was, to some extent, probably right. It is a fact that in our rich country there should not be poor people. We all agree. So, who is responsible for this? The simple answer is our government.

Nobody wanted to be poor; it was our government welfare programs that created two or three generations of poor people with no future. Mr. Obama knows this better than most Americans. The main goal of the welfare programs should always have been to train and educate people to better themselves. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to do so.

This should be our goal.

Capitalism is the most productive system in the history of the world. Because of some greedy human beings it needs to be supervised and regulated. The large majority of Americans agree with it. This should be done without adversely affecting initiative.

Our president is a smart person. He has the ability, without any prejudice, to see what the best system of government in the world is. He knows what our country has achieved during the last 200 years. We have not been perfect, but we have been better than all the others. What is more important is that we keep trying to get better under a completely free system.

It is up to him what path he wants to pursue: a socialist approach where government directs people to failure, or a free competitive system where people decide their own future.

Jorge L. Blanco, Key Biscayne